Happy with the two games they developed for EA, but stung by the experience of losing creative control and not being fully supported by EA’s marketing machine, Gavin and Rubin decided to leave the industry, at least for a time. On the verge of graduating college (they made all of these games before they even got a college degree), Rubin wanted to go to California to learn to surf, while Gavin decided to chase a Ph.D at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Of course, neither of them got quite what they bargained for.

“I actually never got a surfboard and got on the waves,” Rubin said. “I said I was going out there to surf, but I never did it, because I started a special effects company. That got me into 3D graphics.” 3D was very new at the time, and the computers and programs required to do 3D graphics could run $75,000 or more.

Trip Hawkins' 3DO kept Jason Rubin away from the movie industry.

A prohibitive price point and the relative newness of the industry didn’t stop Rubin from getting a contract for his company, though. That contract came from Columbia Pictures for a movie called Wolf, starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. “I got offered to do the morph into the wolf,” Rubin said, “which was one shot. I was about to start it when 3DO called” in 1993.

3DO was the brainchild of none other than Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts that worked so closely with the duo previously. He was planning an ambitious and expensive CD-based console slated to launch in 1994. He called the guys with a tantalizing offer that quickly ended their hiatus and got them back into the business of making games.

“[Hawkins] called up and said, ‘you guys, we’re really great at pushing new stuff!’” Gavin recalled. “’You want a dev machine? Just check it out. No strings!’” They accepted his offer.

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3DO was the brainchild of none other than Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts...

“We hated the cartridge,” Rubin said, talking about the software format running on everything from an Atari 2600 and an NES to the SNES and Genesis. “We wanted to make big games. We wanted to make games with saved games. We didn’t want to have them say, “’we’re only printing Madden.’ Those things sucked about the cartridge.”

Gavin expanded on the issue. “Even though the games brought in this huge gross – not as much as today, but a lot at that time – a lot of it was sucked up into cartridge manufacturing. They were really conservative about printing, because it took so long and the cartridges cost so much. If you got caught with extra cartridges, you could lose all the money you had made.”

“That’s a big change with CDs,” he continued. “You could print them fairly fast, and if you got caught with extra inventory of them, it didn’t matter so much. You might have to pay seven bucks for a CD later on. But essentially, the CDs only cost a dollar to make. The economics were different. No one was really out a fortune.”

Way of the Warrior was Naughty Dog's 3DO fighting game. (Courtesy: GameTrailers Forums)

Indeed, Naughty Dog was at the forefront of the fight against cartridges at a time when many in the industry were attacking CDs for having long load times and for being prone to damage. But they swam against the tide, and the company ended up being on the right side of history, even if it didn’t necessarily play out with 3DO.

They accepted Hawkins’ dev kit, and subsequently agreed to make a game for 3DO. And they intentionally went into the development process without a publisher, using the money earned from Rings of Power to fund the new game. They used almost every last cent they had: $80,000.

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They used almost every last cent they had: $80,000.

“A bunch of things happened on Rings of Power, and happened on Keef the Thief, that we really sort of resented,” Gavin admitted. “We resented this process that EA had where you had to write the script and get it approved and basically design your whole game up front. We spent like a year on Rings of Power, or nine months or something, with this gigantic 300-page script, dickering over details in it and getting it approved. And then, in the end, when we actually made the game, no one looked at the script.”

Designing on the fly was the “appropriate way to make games,” Rubin insisted, though Gavin also noted that marketing was another major problem that made them want to flee from a publisher. In Rings of Power, “there were high tech and guns together. [EA marketing] was like, ‘I don’t know if we want to market to both of those. We’ve never seen that before. They should make it all one or the other.’”

Mortal Kombat was a major inspiration for Way of the Warrior. (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

“The truth is,” Gavin said, “as we knew, the same guys liked fantasy and science fiction.” EA wasn’t interested in reading a 300-page script and game design documents, and frankly, Gavin and Rubin were far more interested in creating as they went then explaining their ideas up front. With Way of the Warrior, their 3DO game, they flew by the seat of their pants.

“Nobody’s going to tell us why our broad call is wrong,” Gavin later said about Way of the Warrior, because there was no publisher constantly looking over their shoulders. Self-funding also allowed them to be smarter with their money and time and go where the gamers – and the money – were. “We’re gonna look at, before starting the game, what’s hot now and what’s a good bang for the buck development-wise and try to make the best game in that. To do a little more market timing. Our previous games, there was no market timing to them.”

“They were just what Andy wanted to play or what I wanted to play,” Rubin added.

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[Naughty Dog's previous games] were just what Andy wanted to play or what I wanted to play.

When Way of the Warrior’s development began in 1993, fighting games were really hot. Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, and Samurai Shodown were tearing up the arcade and the living room alike. Way of the Warrior was going to be 3DO’s fighting game, and it was to go up against the best Midway, Capcom, and SNK had to offer.

They felt it was a fairly easy genre to create a game in. “It wouldn’t take us the three years the past games had taken us,” Rubin said. “RPGs are just bigger and take a lot more time and effort.” Fighting games, on the other hand, are very direct. You have your characters and you have your stages, and once the game is running – which didn’t take much to do – all of the fine-tuning great fighting games required could be accomplished.

“All the [development] resources were put into two characters on screen. They’re big. They got a lot of animation and a lot of moves relative to other games at the time, which had a different balance resource-wise,” Gavin explained. “So we looked at this and we’re like, ‘that’s a good bang for the buck.’… You make one background and one character, you play against yourself, and you’ve got a playable game. You could start working out balance issues and play issues and stuff.”

Prestigious university MIT was the backdrop to Way of the Warrior's development. (Courtesy: MIT)

Rubin and Gavin decided to take a “digitized direction” with Way of the Warrior, much like Mortal Kombat. “At some levels, it’s kind of a slightly more comedic Mortal Kombat ripoff. It’s very over the top,” Gavin said. Their major inspiration was the droves of Hong Kong kung-fu movies they watched together.

To make the game, they knew they had to be in the same location again. Rubin tried to get Gavin to move to Newport Beach, California, but Gavin was still attending MIT, and he convinced Rubin to come to the wintery suburbs of Boston. Gavin acquired a subpar apartment for them to live in as they worked, and they went about the business of creating a 3DO game.

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For the first time, they brought on contractors to help them complete the game.

They couldn’t afford to get a traditional blue screen, so they bought a tan-colored screen -- practically a tarp -- and nailed it to the wall in their living room. It covered the only windows in the apartment, and it covered up their air conditioning vents, as well. Because they positioned it on a certain wall, since they lacked the proper lenses for their camera, it also complicated the act of actually filming.

To get shots against the screen, they had to open their front door and film from their hallway, which confused – and freaked-out – their academic neighbors that attended MIT and Harvard. Meanwhile, Gavin would stay up ‘til all hours of the night working on audio processing. The two men mimicked the kung-fu “hiya!” sounds that would creepily seep out of their apartments as their neighbors tried to sleep.

But while Way of the Warrior was a game designed to be easy to develop, it became a project that was too big for them to handle. For the first time, they brought on contractors to help them complete the game. It was the last time Gavin and Rubin worked on a game by themselves.

World-renowned robotics professor Rodney Brooks is in Way of the Warrior. (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

“It quickly got to the point where, for the first time, two people couldn’t make the whole game,” Rubin said. Because of the fact that they didn’t use a proper blue screen to get footage, it required them to laboriously cut out, pixel-by-pixel, the characters they filmed. They loved the look they got from their approach – they described it as a “Sin City” style – but they needed to get others to help them achieve it by doing the grunt work.

“So we went out,” Rubin continued, “and we put up, literally, on bulletin boards, for people to do this” cropping, cutting, and coloring. “We got people to come in and do the tedious part.”

The folks they got to help them on Way of the Warrior were from all walks of life. One guy was a law student. Another was a Boston-area native who, after his experience with the game, ended up staying in the industry and still works on games today. And their lead tester? He was the Valedictorian of the Harvard class of 1994, a guy named David Liu.

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And their lead tester? He was the Valedictorian of the Harvard class of 1994, a guy named David Liu.

Liu’s not only famous for his academic pedigree, or because of his early work with Naughty Dog. He was a prolific, professional Street Fighter II player. “He was one of those savant guys at Street Fighter who’s just insanely good,” Gavin said. Liu would even try to plug Way of the Warrior during television interviews about his time at Harvard, and was on wanted lists at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City for card counting.

And then, there were the characters in the game. “The other thing is, the people we got to play in this video game were all friends and family,” Rubin said. “We couldn’t afford to pay anyone.” One of the characters in the game was one of Gavin’s MIT professors. He’s Dr. Rodney Brooks, “who’s probably the foremost robot scientist in the world,” according to Gavin, and the head of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Another was a friend of theirs named Vijay, who had an MIT Ph.D in molecular biology, a post-doc from Berkeley, and is, presently, “gunning for the Nobel Prize in protein folding.”

“He’s the secret character in the diaper,” Gavin said with a smile.

Way of the Warrior's engine was nearly used to port Samurai Shodown to 3DO.

They didn’t only lack the funds to pay actors; they also lacked the money to give them proper costumes. Vijay wore a pillowcase as underpants, and another bed sheet as his turban. The jewel in front of the turban was “from a secondhand Jasmine dress-up kit for little girls. As in Jasmine from Aladdin,” Gavin noted.

During production, the two nearly ran out of money. Rubin had $6.37 in his bank account. “I was eating ramen noodles with Andy,” he recalled. Gavin had it just a little better; he was getting paid $14,000 a year to go through MIT’s masters program. They sold their remaining belongings, like a stereo, to get by while they finished the game.

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Andy’s toilet froze and shattered. It was a disaster, okay?

Their living situation deteriorated during these tough times. “Morgan, Jason’s dog, lived with us,” Gavin said. “She was this awesome black lab-ridgeback mix, but she shed a lot. We had this white wall-to-wall carpet. We had not vacuumed in an entire year. There was more visible Morgan hair on the floor than there was carpet. People would come in and look at the carpet and go, ‘ewwwwww, what is with your carpet?’ You could scrape hair and leave white streaks.”

“Andy’s toilet froze and shattered,” Rubin noted abruptly. “It was a disaster, okay? We went all-in on this game, in the sense that startups go all in. We went all-in on this game. The last $10,000 that we had, effectively – although we didn’t spend it last, it would have been our last money – we bought a three-by-three square foot spot at the 3DO booth at CES, because the game show was still at CES. Nine square feet.”

Without a publisher, the idea was to show the game off at 1994’s CES and perhaps drum-up some interest. And in their tiny, modest space, surrounded by “crap” multimedia games, drum-up interest they did. In fact, so much interest was drummed-up that a bidding war erupted over Way of the Warrior between three companies. All of them wanted a piece of Naughty Dog’s project.

Crystal Dynamics almost acquired Way of the Warrior during CES.

The players were 3DO itself, Universal Studios, and Crystal Dynamics. “We came closest with Crystal Dynamics,” Rubin remembered, “but there was a split inside Crystal Dynamics. Half of the people loved the game and wanted to put it out. The other half wanted to buy it and use the engine to make Samurai Shodown, which they had acquired the rights to… But they weren’t going to tell us until they had licensed the game. Then they would tell us, ‘you have only one chance now, and that’s to work on Samurai Shodown, and that’s the only way you’re going to get paid,’ effectively. We caught onto that.”

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Had we gone with 3DO as an exclusive, it could have been the end of Naughty Dog.

Hawkins put the pressure on the guys to give 3DO the rights to the game using what they described as his endless charm and positivity, or his “reality distortion field.” He “just had a lot of personal charisma,” Gavin noted. “He’s an incredibly nice and fair guy, too. Every business deal we had with him, he was extremely fair and generous. That was very refreshing to have a businessman who was always fair.”

But they didn’t know if he was painting an honest picture for them. “I used to put a pencil between my leg and the table we were sitting at, with the pointed end down, and jab myself every now and then, to remind myself not to fall under his spell,” Rubin said. “He was an incredibly persuasive person.” It affected everyone around him, including his employees, who seemed to hang on his every word.

“But Universal offered us to come on the lot to make additional games, to fund additional games, to give us creative freedom, and it just sounded a lot cooler,” Rubin concluded. “Plus, I loved LA. It was, in the end, a better deal. For us, this was one of the big decision points. Had we gone with 3DO as an exclusive, it could have been the end of Naughty Dog.”

Those games that Universal promised to let Naughty Dog make while giving them complete creative freedom would all fall under an all-new series Gavin and Rubin would come up with when driving across the country. That series would be known as Crash Bandicoot.

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